Thursday, April 17, 2014

Gray Daze - 4.13.2014

Adventure season is in full force here, its light out later and later, and with the extended curfew comes more and more adventures. Despite the perception otherwise, there are still only 24 hours in each day. I'm sleeping less and getting behind blogging; it will be something to do come October when its rainy and gray. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Speaking of gray, last Saturday brought another classic AK issue: good snow and horrible visibility. We needed rocks or trees. Tree skiing here is nothing to write home about, and this year you'd be writing about forests of man eating alders. So, we went hunting for couloirs at Hatcher.

We headed up Gold Cord Road. Looking back at Ray Wallace, which was apparently awesome. We were able to confirm this on Monday night.

Before long we found a nice north facing line that I believe is called the Lost Couloir. Seemed like an appropriate name given the weather...

I, for one, was glad to get out of the wind and nauseating flat light vertigo.

10 meters before the top the snow quickly became windloaded and slabby; given the weather, my eggplant ankle, and recent events we were happy to call it and avoid setting off a slab in the rocky and steep terrain.

Rachel:

Alex:

Into the featureless white soup of the apron:

From there we headed towards some chutes we'd seen. The descent through the featureless valley was interesting: at one point I was sure I was wildly accelerating out of control only to discover I was stopped. Following the others and watching their trepidation was equally entertaining.

As suspected, we found another zone of lines. But, the April sun is getting high in the sky and had turned the east aspect into an ACL nightmare of a sun crust.

After turning around and seeing this we decided to call it a day.

Looks like this weekend is supposed to be glorious, hoping the snow holds!